From Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections From A Damaged Life I gather a few sheaves worth remembrance. I’m sure that others would alight on affinities all their own, these are but a few that curled up inside me like the barbs of a wildcat – who having been found out, suddenly pounces upon its prey out of desperation and a dark sense of jubilant lust.
Aphorisms and maxims alike are like good wine and conversation, sometimes gnomic at others pithy and gamboling, they stay us against that which would deign destroy us, and offer us respite or an ironic commentary on the darker corners of our own damaged lives: an opportunity to digest that which we forbid ourselves, the bittersweet acknowledgement from elsewhere, an opening toward strange elective affinities – exposing so delicately and with such nuanced relish the barbed wit of those minds that haunt us like specters out of some secret history of the earth. These small bursts of blindness and insight deliver a scent of that jouissance which transgresses those limiting barriers of the human that contain us, and offer a palatable effervescence that defends us against a cold and alien world.
Prelude: A Writer’s Life
“Only a speaking that transcends writing by absorbing it, can deliver human speech from the lie that it is already human.”
“In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”
“Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the crearures of the air.”
“Rigour and purity in assembling words, however simple the result, create a vacuum.”
“The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful.”
Negative Dialectic
“It would serve no purpose to try to point to a way out of this entanglement. Yet it is undoubtedly possible to name the fatal moment that brings the whole dialectic into play. It lies in the exclusive character of what comes first. The original relationship, in its mere immediacy, already presupposes abstract temporal sequence.”
“…the dialectic advances by way of extremes, driving thoughts with the utmost consequentiality to the point where they turn back on themselves, instead of qualifying them.”
“Historically, the notion of time is itself formed on the basis of the order of ownership. But the desire to possess reflects time as a fear of losing, of the irrecoverable.”
“…the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. It is objectively devalued as this distance is reduced; the more it approximates to the preexisting standard, the further its antithetical function is diminished, and only in this, in its manifest relation to its opposite, not in its isolated existence, are the claims of thought founded.”
“In the end hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable…”
Intellectual Life
“The injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought.”
“Reflection that takes sides with naivety condemns itself: cunning and obscurantism remain what they always were.”
“Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.”
“To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: Only death is an image of undistorted life.”
“To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination.”
“For the intellectual, inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of solidarity. All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation, merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity.”
“It is the sufferings of men that should be shared: the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.”
“We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious values of good society, tactless.”
“The centre of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition.”
“Error lies in excessive honesty. A man who lies is ashamed, for each lie teaches him the degradation of a world which, forcing him to lie in order to live, promptly sings the praises of loyalty and truthfulness.”
“The lie, once a liberal means of communication, has today become one of the techniques of insolence enabling each individual to spread around him the glacial atmosphere in whose shelter he can thrive.”
“Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem.”
“When philosophers, who are well known to have difficulty in keeping silent, engage in conversation, they should try always to lose the argument, but in such a way as to convict their opponent of untruth.”
On Hegel: “In a philosophical text all the propositions ought to be equally close to the centre. Without Hegel’s ever having said so explicitly, his whole procedure bears witness to such an intention. Because it acknowledges no first principle, it ought, strictly speaking, to know of nothing secondary or deduced; and it transfers the concept of mediation from formal connections to the substance of the object itself, thereby attempting to overcome the difference between the latter and an external thought that mediates it. The limits to the success of such an intention in Hegelian philosophy are also those of its truth, that is to say, the remnants of prima philosophia, the supposition of the subject as something which is, in spite of everything, ‘primary’. One of the tasks of dialectical logic is to eliminate the last traces of a deductive system, together with the last advocatory gestures of thought.”
Intimacy
“Divorce, even between good-natured, amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers and discolours all it touches. It is as if the sphere of intimacy, the unwatchful trust of shared life, is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it flourished is broken off.”
“Intimacy between people is forbearance, tolerance, refuge for idiosyncrasies. If dragged into the open, it reveals the moment of weakness in it… It seizes the inventory of trust. Things which were once signs of loving care, images of reconciliation, breaking loose as independent values, show their evil, cold, pernicious side.”
“The whole sombre base on which the institution of marriage rises, the husband’s barbarous power over the property and work of his wife, the no less barbarous sexual oppression that can compel a man to take life-long responsibility for a woman with whom it once gave him pleasure to sleep – all this crawls into the light from cellars and foundations when the house is demolished.”
“The practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit economy to stunt human qualities and the further they spread the more they sever everything tender. For tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose, a solace still glimpsed by those embroiled in purposes; a legacy of old privileges promising a privilege-free condition.”
“Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people. For only as long as they abstain from importuning one another with giving and taking, discussion and implementation, control and function, is there space enough between them for the delicate connecting filigree of external forms in which alone the internal can crystallize.” (note to self: an almost forewarning attack on those normative reasoners such as Brandom or Negarestani in their embrace of an autonomous sphere or “space of reasons” in which “giving and taking” of reasons, etc. becomes the post-sociological heaven of humanity)
“In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.”
“The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the wrong.”
“The liberation of nature would be to abolish its self-fabrication.”
Under the Sign of Austerity
“If in Europe the esoteric gesture was often only a pretext for the blindest self-interest, the concept of austerity, though hardly ship-shape or watertight, still seems, in emigration, the most acceptable lifeboat. …To most boarders, it threatens starvation or madness.”
“Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.”
“In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. … Now objectively threatened, the subjectivity of the rulers and their hangers-on becomes totally inhuman. So the class realizes itself, taking upon itself the destructive will of the course of the world. The bourgeois live on like spectres threatening doom.”
“The miser of our time is the man who considers nothing too expensive for himself, and everything for others. He thinks in equivalents, subjecting his whole private life to the law that one gives less than one receives in return, yet enough to ensure that one receives something.”
“The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant: in them even the nostalgia for independent existence, defunct in any case, is sent packing.”
On Time: “The irreversibility of time constitutes an objective moral criterion. But it is one intimately related to myth, like abstract time itself. The exclusiveness implicit in time gives rise, by its inherent law, to the exclusive domination of hermetically sealed groups, finally to that of big business.”
“Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies. From the objective spirit of language they expect the sustenance refused them by society; those whose mouths are full of words have nothing else between their teeth. So they take revenge on language. Being forbidden to love it, they maim the body of language, and so repeat in impotent strength the disfigurement inflicted on them.”
Mores and Customs
On Goethe’s ascesis: “The human consisted for him in a self-limitation which affirmatively espoused as its own cause the ineluctable course of history, the inhumanity of progress, the withering of the subject. But what has happened since makes Goethean renunciation look like fulfilment.”
On Tact: “The precondition of tact is convention no longer intact yet still present. Now fallen into irreparable ruin, it lives on only in the parody of forms, an arbitrarily devised or recollected etiquette for the ignorant, of the kind preached by unsolicited advisers in newspapers, while the basis of agreement that carried those conventions in their human hour has given way to the blind conformity of car-owners and radio-listeners.”
“The nominalism of tact helps what is most universal, naked external power, to triumph even in the most intimate constellations. To write off convention as an outdated, useless and extraneous ornament is only to confirm the most extraneous of all things, a life of direct domination.”
On Humanism: “Freedom has contracted to pure negativity, and what in the days of art nouveau was known as a beautiful death has shrunk to the wish to curtail the infinite abasement of living and the infinite torment of dying, in a world where there are far worse things to fear than death. – The objective end of humanism is only another expression for the same thing. It signifies that the individual as individual, in representing the species of man, has lost the autonomy through which he might realize the species.”
The Brutalization of Life
“The technique of the concentranon camp is to make the prisoners like the guards, the murdered, murderers.”
“Not only were all good things, as Nietzsche knew, once bad things: the gentlest, left to follow their own momentum, have a tendency to culminate in unimaginable brutality.”
“Behind the pseudo-democratic dismantling of ceremony, of old-fashioned courtesy, of the useless conversation suspected, not even unjustly, of being idle gossip, behind the seeming clarification and transparency of human relations that no longer admit anything undefined, naked brutality is ushered in. … Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things.”
” The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy.”
“Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes.”
“The more someone has espoused the cause of his own aggression, the more perfectly he represents the repressive principle of society. In this sense more than in any other, perhaps, the proposition is true that the most individual is the most general.”
“There is a certain gesture of virility, be it one’s own or someone else’s, that calls for suspicion. It expresses independence, the sureness of the power to command, the tacit complicity of all males. Earlier this was called with awed respect the whim of the master… Its archetype is the handsome dinner-jacketed figure returning late to his bachelor flat, switching on the indirect lighting and mixing himself a whisky and the soda: the carefully recorded hissing of the mineral water says what arrogant mouth keeps to itself: that he despises anything that does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream, particularly women, which is why they, precisely, find him irresistible. For him the ideal form of human relations is the club, that arena of a respect founded on scrupulous unscrupulousness.”
“Solidarity is polarized into the desperate loyalty of those who have no way back, and virtual blackmail practised on those who want nothing to do with gaolers, nor to fall foul of thieves.”
“The famous are not happy in their lot. They become brand-name commodities, alien and incomprehensible to themselves, and, as their own living images, they are as if dead.”
Aesthetic Negativity
“No gaze attains beauty that is not accompanied by indifference, indeed almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object contemplated. And it is only infatuation, the unjust disregard for the claims of every existing thing, that does justice to what exists.”
“The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes. They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”
“Perdition comes from thought as violence, as a short cut that breaches the impenetrable to attain the universal, which has content in impenetrability alone, not in abstracted correspondences between different objects. One might almost say that truth itself depends on the objects, the patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular: what passes beyond it without having first entirely lost itself, proceeds to judge without having first been guilty of the injustice of contemplation, loses itself at last in emptiness.”
“Stravinsky wrote the ‘Histoire du Soldat’ for a sparse, shock-maimed chamber ensemble. It turned out to be his best score, the only convincing surrealist manifesto, its convulsive, dreamlike compulsion imparting to music an inkling of negative truth. The pre-condition of the piece was poverty: it dismantled official culture so drastically because, denied access to the latter’s material goods, it also escaped the ostentation that is inimical to culture.”
“Progress and barbarism are today so matted together in mass culture that only barbaric asceticism towards the latter, and towards progress in technical means, could restore an unbarbaric condition. No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production of colour films and television, millionaire’s magazines and Toscanini.”
“He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will freedom from exchange.”
“In the detachment necessary to all thought is flaunted the privilege that permits immunity. The aversion aroused by this is now the most serious obstacle to theory: if one gives way to it, one keeps quiet; if not, one is coarsened and debased by confiding in one’s own culture.”
On Freud and Psycho-analysis
“Freud’s unenlightened enlightenment plays into the hands of bourgeois disillusion. As a late opponent of hypocrisy, he stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression.”
“Those who feel equal revulsion for pleasure and paradise are indeed best suited to serve as objects: the empty, mechanized quality observable in so many who have undergone successful analysis is to be entered to the account not only of their illness but also of their cure, which dislocates what it liberates.”
“The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point. … The dissection of man into his faculties is a projection of the division of labour onto its pretended subject, inseparable from the interest in deploying and manipulating them to greater advantage.”
“All that remains of the criticism of bourgeois consciousness is the shrug with which doctors have always signaled their secret complicity with death. – In psychology, in the bottomless fraud of mere inwardness, which is not by accident concerned with the ‘properties’ of men, is reflected what bourgeois society has practised for all time with outward property. … Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.”
“Terror before the abyss of the self is removed by the consciousness of being concerned with nothing so very different from arthritis or sinus trouble. Thus conflicts lose their menace. They are accepted, but by no means cured, being merely fitted as an unavoidable component into the surface of standardized life.”
